It was shocking to see the images of an eight-year-old being physically abused by his employer in Gurgaon recently. Though this is a particularly appalling case, it is important to remember that this boy is just one of thousands of children illegally employed as domestic workers across India without a voice and subject to exploitation.

Various studies and surveys estimate that the worldwide magnitude of child domestic work is enormous, representing 20 to 40 percent of all recorded instances of child labour. While poverty, inequality and lack of education are the main underlying causes of child labour, in the case of child domestic work there are other complexities such as the cultural sanction and social acceptance of children working. The deep-rooted gender imbalance further fuels the problem with the majority of child domestic workers being girls.

Organised operations working across underdeveloped states/districts traffic children of poor families and hand them over to placement agencies based in cities and metros. West Bengal and Jharkhand are two such states from where thousands of children are sent or trafficked every year to Kolkata, Mumbai or Delhi to work as child labour and some of them are even sold into prostitution. As domestic help the children shoulder heavy responsibilities with little or no remuneration, are completely at the mercy of the employer and frequently suffer from physical and sexual violence.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (UNCRC), Article 32, recognises the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with child's education or to be harmful to child's health or physical, mental or social development. Child domestic work is one such hazardous and exploitative form of labour recognised by the International Labour Organisation (Convention 182) as intolerable. Indeed, child domestic work jeopardises the child’s physical, mental, educational and social development.

Through a notification on October 10, 2006, the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act (CLPRA) specifically prohibited employing children below 14 years as domestic help. Unfortunately, in spite of the ban, child domestic work, which is tantamount to modern-day slavery, is still endemic.

The plight of the unnamed eight-year-old boy could be that of Mithu or Halima across the metros of India. Typically, the day of a child domestic worker begins at six in the morning to prepare tea for the family, wash the utensils, mop the floor and do other household chores. Halima, a former 12-year-old-child domestic worker in Kolkata, went to bed at one am and slept under the stairs. She was not given enough food to eat. She was not allowed to meet her parents. Her employers verbally abused her regularly.

Children working as domestic help are forced to work long hours, without food, are either paid minimal wages or not paid at all, and as they live with the employer, are largely invisible to the outside world. This invisibility is a key reason for the vulnerability of child domestic workers to exploitation and physical and psychological abuse, as the boy’s case in Gurgaon shows.

The invisible nature of child domestic work makes it difficult to take it out in the public domain as an issue for public debate. What also allows this cruel form of child labour to continue is the social and cultural sanction surrounding the employment of children as domestic workers.

To make things worse, there is a poor track record of enforcement of laws. Little has been done so far to rescue child domestic workers and to punish their employers. In one parliamentary session in 2009, the minister of state for labour and employment, Harish Rawat, made a written statement that under the CLPRA, there had been seven prosecutions and four convictions in the past three years! This sums up the deplorable state of affairs. There is urgent need to make child labour a cognisable offence and to strictly enforce the law to bring offenders to book. Having said this, the law can only act as a deterrent.

While laws are important and must be enforced, each and every one of us as citizens has a responsibility not to employ children and to speak out in our own circles against those employing children as domestic help and reporting any such cases to Childline or the local child welfare committee. Let’s make child domestic work socially and culturally unacceptable.